Anti-Trump Brothers Accused of Fraud

If you have a Twitter account, it’s inevitable that you’ve seen the Krassenstein brothers’ propaganda come across your feed.

The two brothers out of Florida have each attracted followers in the hundreds of thousands (mainly by following hundreds of thousands of other Twitter accounts, and hoping they follow back), and have become known for the hyperbolic, spammy nonsense they pollute the national discourse with. (RELATED: Liberals Mock Donald Trump Jr. And Vanessa for Impending Divorce).

The two have a combined following of over 1.1 million, and a history of internet ventures that involves hopping on internet trends. It appears that the “Resistance” movement is the latest social media trend they’ve planted their flag in.

The brothers also make money from a clickbait website they run called “Independent Reporter.” The Twitter account for the “Independent Reporter” website has been active since 2008, meaning it’s been re-purposed from some earlier failed internet venture of the brothers.

Much like the Twitter account, their website “Independent Reporter” has an interesting history. According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, IR.net was as recently as last year called “Investor Relations.” A few months before that, it was called “Inside Reality,” where it “scour[ed] the planet each and every day, in search of the most interesting, intriguing, and amazing news in the world.”

But most interesting of all, each website contained the same Rolodex of writers. Why? Because they didn’t really exist but gave the facade of a legitimate publication.

The brothers have been changing ventures for years, and with the gullible anti-Trump resistance movement, seem to have finally found something that stuck. There’s nothing illegal with that – but there is with their past ventures.

In late 2016, federal agents showed up at the Fort Myers, Florida, homes of brothers Brian and Edward Krassenstein, seizing computers and financial records, and hauling off with “at least 20 to 30 bundles of stuff.” At the time, the story was just a notable blip on local media’s crime blotter. But in the two years since, the Krassensteins have become more than a pair of local businessmen. They’re now prominent members of the online anti-Trump “resistance.”

As it turns out, the nature of their prior businesses was fraudulent.

The Krassensteins began hawking dubious investment advice—way back in 2003—on a pair of internet forums, selling ads to online money-making operations that included a number of apparent scams, including some run by people later convicted on charges ranging from fraud to capital murder.

According to prosecutors, the services the Krassensteins promoted on their websites duped thousands of “investors” into funding Ponzi scheme-type scams and even resulted in some downloading a virus that emptied their accounts on an anonymous online-payment platform used by the Krassensteins themselves

While the Krassenstein brothers maintain that while their website contained ads that ended up being scams, they bear no responsibility for it. Federal investigators disagree.

In a civil asset forfeiture complaint filed in August of last year, Homeland Security Special Agent Michael Adams alleged that the brothers were paid huge sums by online scammers engaged in illegal activities (hence the $500k confiscated from them).

None of the Krassenstein’s followers will believe a word of this, of course. They don’t call them “useful idiots” for nothing.”